The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) is the Coen Brothers' western anthology you can watch online on iFILM. Six separate tales from the old West, with no shared plot, held together only by one unmistakable view of life and death.

It opens with singing gunslinger Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) — chatty, grinning and lethally fast on the draw. Then come a hapless bank robber, a limbless traveling performer and his keeper, a lone prospector panning a pristine valley for gold, a woman riding a wagon train toward an uncertain future, and a strange band of passengers sharing one nighttime stagecoach. Each chapter opens like a page from an old illustrated book and ends with a sudden, very Coen-like turn.

Joel and Ethan Coen made the film for Netflix, and its screenplay took a top prize at the Venice Film Festival. The tone swings from pitch-black comedy to icy fable: people sing, joke and die, while the stories outlast them. Stream The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) online on iFILM.